Latest news with #SundanceStudio
Yahoo
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Bucks County, USA' Creators Say the Key to Earning Conservatives' Trust Was Listening: ‘It Has to Be Genuine'
Pennsylvania is always a swing state come election time, and 2024 was no different. But, heading to one town in particular to talk to its residents about their split views, the creators of 'Bucks County, USA' admit that they discovered their own inherent 'judgment.' Premiering the first two episodes at this year's Sundance Film Festival, the five-part docuseries tells the story of Evi and Vanessa, two 14-year-olds living in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, who are best friends, despite their opposing political beliefs. As nationwide disputes over public education explode into vitriol and division in their hometown, the girls and others in the community fight to discover the humanity in 'the other side.' Stopping by TheWrap's Sundance Studio presented by World of Hyatt, producer Jason Sosnoff and director and executive producer Robert May revealed that talking to 'the other side' themselves was actually a 'heart-opening experience.' 'You start to realize the more you talk to people that you have an incredible amount of judgment. You're not even aware of it,' Sosnoff said. 'And so I found myself actually responding very openly to the conservatives in the piece and just sort of seeing how they felt they had been demonized. And when you start talking to somebody for long enough, particularly if you're in the same room as them, you're going to start to see their humanity.' He added that talking to these people was helpful, but earning their trust actually came down to listening. Doing that resulted in the conservative community enjoying the episodes they saw. 'It has to be genuine, you know?' May agreed. 'And I really care about these people that we've been talking with, every one of them. And they stay in constant contact with us now because they feel like they've developed this bond with us of trust. And they've seen the piece, and they felt that we didn't twist their words, we didn't do any gotcha moments, just like we said we wouldn't. Everything was in context.' You can watch TheWrap's full discussion with Levinson and May in the video above. The post 'Bucks County, USA' Creators Say the Key to Earning Conservatives' Trust Was Listening: 'It Has to Be Genuine' | Video appeared first on TheWrap.
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Yahoo
‘The Perfect Neighbor' Uses Raw Police Footage to Unveil the Truth of a Community Tragedy
In an unconventional approach to documentary filmmaking, director and award winning editor Geeta Gandbhir relied entirely on police body camera footage to tell the story of a neighborhood tragedy in 'The Perfect Neighbor,' a ripped-from the-headlines documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday. 'We got our hands on the body cam footage, and we realized how critical it was to show the before of this story,' Gandbhir told TheWrap CEO Sharon Waxman at TheWrap's Sundance Studio presented by World of Hyatt. 'We often see the aftermath of such a tragedy, right? But how rarely do we see the community and the family as they were before?' 'The Perfect Neighbor' explores how a tight-knit community was torn apart after Susan Lorincz, a 60-year-old white woman from central Florida, shot and killed her neighbor Ajike Owens, a 35-year-old Black mother of four, through a locked door. The film uses police footage to document both the peaceful community life before the incident and the fallout in its tragic aftermath. Executive producer Soledad O'Brien emphasized how the footage provided unfiltered access to events. 'I think it's additionally helpful we stay out of it,' O'Brien said. 'There's no person saying, 'I picked these people. I've shot it this way.' It's just this is how police responded. This is their point of view.' For Pamela Dias, Owens' mother, the raw footage captured painful truths about the incident. 'My daughter lost her life because of hate,' Diaz said. 'This was a community of family and of children playing, and my daughter lost her life because of hate.' The film highlights issues around 'Stand Your Ground' laws, racial tensions and community divisions. Gandbhir noted that the police footage showed an otherwise harmonious neighborhood disrupted by one resident's actions. 'None of these other people call the police, none of these other people do that. It's her,' she said, referring to Lorincz' repeated complaints about children playing. Lorincz was sentenced to 25 years in prison for aggravated manslaughter in November 2024. Watch the full interview with Gandbhir, O'Brien and Dias in the video above. The post 'The Perfect Neighbor' Uses Raw Police Footage to Unveil the Truth of a Community Tragedy | Video appeared first on TheWrap.
Yahoo
26-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘All That's Left of You' Director Says Recognition of Suffering Is One Way to Heal Gaza
The war between Israel and Hamas ravaging Gaza over the past year has put Palestine back in the global spotlight — and 'All That's Left of You' is director Cherien Dabis' effort to put those months of loss and violence into context. Long before the Hamas attacks against Israeli citizens on Oct. 7, 2023, Dabis had started work on 'All That's Left of You,' a film that opens with a Palestinian teen confronting Israeli soldiers and then working back through the events that led to that moment across decades and a generation through the eyes of her mother. Dabis recounted one of her most haunting memories growing up as the daughter of a West Bank refugee, traveling between there and Jordan and requiring foreign citizenship just to see their family. At the age of eight, her entire family was forced to be strip searched by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint, leading to a tense confrontation between her father and the soldiers. 'I was just convinced they were going to kill him,' she told TheWrap editor-in-chief Sharon Waxman while sitting at TheWrap's Sundance Studio presented by World of Hyatt. She went on to explain that she wanted to create a story about the Palestinian struggle through the years. 'There were stories from before I was born, from 1948 from 1967, and I always wondered why people didn't know the Palestinian perspective of what happened to us and how that impacted us over generations,' she said. 'I just really wanted to tell that story so that … people could better understand the Palestinian perspective.' The teen's mother in the film is played by Maria Zreik, who is also Palestinian. In conversation with TheWrap at Sundance, she recounted learning about surviving hardship from her maternal grandmother, who was a Holocaust survivor, and her paternal grandparents, who initially fled Palestine during the start of the Nakba in 1948. Today, she still has family that lives in Galilee. 'I think you'd be hard pressed to find a Palestinian who didn't see themselves in this film in some way, because it really is our collective story,' she said. 'But I think also the film really speaks to larger themes of how we can overcome tragedy and personal loss.' Dabis and Zreik's film comes out at Sundance just a week after a cease-fire agreement came into effect in Gaza, with Hamas beginning to release Israeli hostages. With so many scars lingering from the Oct. 7 attacks and the subsequent bloodshed in Gaza, Dabis hopes that people who see 'All That's Left of You' will see that 'recognition of suffering is one way to heal.' 'There's been so much denial of what happened to Palestinians in 1948 and … I think that that perspective is incredibly damaging and dangerous,' she said. 'There's this passage of this trauma, which the movie shows from one generation to another that I think we need to recognize and look at so that we can then do something about it.' Watch Dabis and Zreik's full interview in the video above. The post 'All That's Left of You' Director Says Recognition of Suffering Is One Way to Heal Gaza | Video appeared first on TheWrap.
Yahoo
26-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Pee-Wee as Himself' Director Got a Recording From Paul Reubens 24 Hours Before He Died
Over the course of two years, Matt Wolf spent hours interviewing Paul Reubens for his new HBO documentary 'Pee-Wee as Himself,' capturing a portrait of a man who could be warm and inviting on some days and pushy and controlling on others. It was a push-and-pull relationship between the director and his subject right up to the day before his death on July 30, 2023. 'I had no idea that Paul had been battling cancer for six years,' Wolf told senior writer Drew Taylor at TheWrap's Sundance Studio presented by World of Hyatt. 'I did have the sense that Paul was motivated to tell his story in a way he hadn't been before, that it was going to be challenging for him, but that he threw himself into that process and was fully committed to being himself on camera in a way that was totally uncomfortable and something he had never done,' he continued. 'The idea that these would be the last words that he would share publicly with the world was completely off my radar.' Wolf decided to make his relationship with Reubens over the course of the interviews part of the final cut of 'Pee-Wee as Himself,' showing how the famed comedic actor wasn't always forthcoming on every question. 'On the first day, the whole kind of rebelling against the process, or kind of pushing back on me, or telling jokes as a way to avoid addressing more kind of difficult subject matter. I realized that's how it was going to go. I certainly didn't take it personally,' he said. 'He was, by his own admission, incredibly controlling, as you can tell in the film, super gregarious, and also very ambivalent about being known publicly.' Wolf and Reubens had a final interview scheduled in the summer of 2023, but Reubens cancelled it two weeks prior to his death. Wolf says he found out about the actor's passing via social media and decided to travel to Los Angeles to meet with the people who were closest to Reubens. That led to a meeting with top Hollywood publicist Kelly Bush Novak, who provided Wolf with a recording of Reubens taped the day before his death. 'He made it for the documentary because he wanted to do that final interview, but it was too late,' Wolf recounted. 'Every day I woke up saying, 'You need to rise to the occasion of these extraordinary circumstances,' and the responsibility you've been handed to both live up to the challenge to tell Paul's story and his full complexity, but also to dramatize what happened, because it's a very unusual situation and circumstance for telling somebody's life story.' Watch the full interview in the embed above. The post 'Pee-Wee as Himself' Director Got a Recording From Paul Reubens 24 Hours Before He Died appeared first on TheWrap.
